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A New York Times Bestselling Author -- When the nation's economy foundered in 2008, blame was almost universally directed at Wall Street. But celebrated economic policy maker and political theorist Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown: the increasing concentration of income at the top, and a middle class deep in debt to maintain a decent standard of living. In Aftershock, Reich offers a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for lastingly improving America's economy.

Since his tenure as secretary of labor in the 1990s, Reich has expounded his economic and political opinions in books, and here he reviews the recent recession. His retrospective diagnosis for the recession’s cause is simple: too much national income went to the rich, which induced the federal government and the middle class to subsist on credit, creating a bubble that inevitably burst. From his identification of stagnant consumer purchasing power as the problem, Reich’s solution unfolds with ineluctable Keynesian predictability: raise income, inheritance, and capital-gains taxes on the rich, and move the revenue down the income scale in the form of expanding programs such as Medicare and Medicaid or tax breaks such as the earned income tax credit. Reich also wants a “wage insurance” program and a carbon tax: blissfully, the federal government’s debt would not increase under such a restoration of the “bargain” between rich and nonrich, according to Reich. Ensured a current-events hearing by his public prominence, Reich may find his readership defined by those in tune with his short tract’s expansionist view of government. --Gilbert Taylor
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

AFTERSHOCK may well be the most important book written on the current economic crisis. I say this because it offers a critical insight that I have seen in very few other places: The fundamental cause of our problems is the relentless drive toward income concentration. The problem with concentrating income into the hands of a few people is that you take money from millions of people who would spend nearly all of it, and give it to a tiny number of people who can't and won't spend it -- but will instead save it, gamble with it, or invest it offshore. The end result is simply too few viable consumers to drive the economy.

Reich points out that income for American middle class families has been essentially stagnant or declining for over three decades. The middle class has coped with this in three basic ways: (1) Women have entered the workforce, (2) People worked longer hours, and, of course, (3) We all relied on debt (credit cards and home equity loans) rather than income to support our consumption. Those coping methods are now exhausted, and we are left in a position where average Americans simply do not have sufficient discretionary income to support a sustainable recovery. The great American consumer class -- which was the driving force behind our prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s -- has been largely decimated.

To his credit, Reich correctly identifies globalization and, especially, automation technology as primary forces behind declining middle class wages. At the same time, rather than enacting countervailing policies, the United States (beginning with Reagan) has gone in the exact opposite direction and adopted a conservative agenda that has actually accelerated the trend toward income concentration.Read more ›

Every middle class American should read this book. Many observations about income disparities have been written up lately but Reich pulls the important points together in a powerful and accessible way.

Reich's main thesis is that the current transition the US economy is under is misunderstood. Many of the policy elite (Geithner, Volcker) have repeated the familiar claim that Americans are living beyond their means. Personally I don't discount that completely but Reich's insight goes much deeper and rings truer: "The problem was not that American spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them."

"We cannot have a sustained recovery until we address it. ... Until this transformation is made, our economy will continue to experience phantom recoveries and speculative bubbles, each more distressing than the one before."

Anyone looking at the unemployment data since WWII has to wonder why the unemployment component of the last three recessions is so prolonged. Instead of a sharp trend up, there are long slopes of delayed returns to peak employment. (Google "calculated risk blog" and look at Dec. 2010 articles.) I believe Reich has demonstrated the main culprit this. To be clear, he is not describing the detailed mechanics of what triggered the Great Recession. (Nouriel Roubini has a good book that I would recommend for more on the financial fraud, leverage and credit risks involved - Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.Read more ›

In this concise and well reasoned book, Robert Reich shows that the origin of the "Great Recession" lay in the widening gap between the very rich and the middle class. In brief, middle class incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated or even declined, while the very rich have accumulated a larger and larger share of the nation's wealth. The nation's wealth has indeed been redistributed: upward.

This created a structural problem in the economy, since middle class workers no longer can afford to buy the products and services they produce, and the very rich cannot possibly spend the vast amounts of money they accumulate. Businesses remain "profitable" by outsourcing jobs or replacing workers with technology; this compounds the middle class dilemma because many of the jobs they did are gone forever.

With a shrinking consumer base for the products they offer, businesses cannot justify expansion, and do not create jobs. The rich, looking for places to put the huge amounts of money they control, are attracted to speculation; new bubbles are inevitable. At the same time, great wealth translates into political power, making any useful change extremely difficult.

Since the problems are structural, they must be solved with structural changes, and Reich ends with a list of suggestions for the kinds of changes that could help direct more money and success to middle class Americans. Many readers will think his suggestions are politically unfeasible, and while he makes a valiant stab at optimism, it is clear that Reich is very much aware of the obstacles in the way.

Before things get better, it seems, they will have to get worse. Much worse.